Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Preparing for a module and using eStudio

As part of the preparation for the Collaborative module I'm looking at how students might access the introductory PowerPoint on line. Click hereOne option is using SlideShare, which you can check out using the click here link above. I'm still
wrestling with the new eStudio technology and have not yet solved the issues
surrounding embedding web-links. However the first step has been taken and I'm
now familiarising myself with this type of file sharing.

I also had a meeting this morning with another tutor who will be sharing the
delivery of the module. This was very interesting pedagogically as we began to
unpick all the elements I had initially designed as studio workshop sessions.
In particular if collaborative practice is to be embedded deeply into the
module, it has to start with the staff team. We decided that my initial
workshops were perhaps too ‘directed’ and that they didn’t allow for enough ‘learning’
and were not clear enough as to which aspects of collaborative practice we were
trying to highlight. We have therefore decided to start again and to rewrite
the workshops, each one giving the students more responsibility
and also making them take on board particular roles; for instance artist and
audience, artist and technician, artist instructor and instruction interpreter,
artist as group orchestrator etc. The good thing is that we have time to get
these workshops re-written as the module does not start until October. One task we will still use though is the artist and curator session. Below is the current rough draft and will be finalised within the next couple of weeks.

Curation as
a collaborative practice

The
miniature gallery

Curators

Working in
teams of 4 to 5 (Please keep to your designatedC, M, Y or K group for this workshop) you will curate the work of 4 or 5
other students who will also be operating as a curatorial team using your work.

You will
develop a unifying concept for an exhibition that will be sited within the
studio using a miniature gallery and will be designed to change an audience’s
understanding or reception of the works displayed.

Curatorial
decisions can be driven by aesthetics, logic, theme, interaction or any other
unifying factor decided upon by the group.

Exhibitors

Exhibitors
must relinquish any direct control over the artwork that they are providing for
curation. All that is expected of you as an exhibitor is to learn from what the
curatorial team have done with your work. You are allowed to ask questions as
to why work has been presented in the way it has, but not allowed to criticise
the curatorial team.

All students
are required to donate at least one miniature piece of work to a curatorial
team.

C & M
You will install in the morning and the exhibition will open at 11.15am.
Viewing, 11.15 to 11.35am. Group C
will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11. 40 to 11.50,
group M will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11.50 to
12.00 noon.

Y & K
You will install in the afternoon and the exhibition will open at 3.15pm.
Viewing, 3.15 to3. 35pm. Group
Y will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3. 40 to 3.50,
group K will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3.50 to
4.00pm.

Preparation
and research suggestions:

You need to
have made a basic miniature gallery. This can be as simple as a cardboard box
or carefully made in the machine shop. Make a careful decision as to the colour
of the walls/floors. You will need a good camera/mobile phone capable of taking
images of small objects and keeping them in focus.

Fixings and
fittings are vital to exhibition curation. If this was a ‘real-size’ exhibition
you would need to consult with Richard Baker, who has plinths and certain tools
and equipment that would be needed, however you cannot drill into the floors as
they include under-floor heating elements and any changes you might make to the
wall surfaces would have to be easily and quickly removed, so that the next
group of curators/users of the space were not inconvenienced. Therefore by
using a miniature gallery you don’t have to worry about those issues, however,
you don’t want work falling off the walls of your miniature gallery, so do
think carefully about how to attach work to walls or how to present floor based
or video work.

Take some
time out during the week beforehand to develop a group curatorial stance.

Look at how,
why and most importantly what contemporary curators have been doing.

All individuals to make a gallery space out of a cardboard
box. This to be able to be opened out so that photographs can be taken. See below.

Stage two

All individuals to make a series of miniature artworks based
on what they have been doing in the studio.

Stage three

Miniature work done the previous week to be displayed in
bays. Curatorial teams organised (teams can’t select work displayed in their
own bay, so we will simply move round so that teams curate other bays) to
select from the work and organise mini exhibitions in mini galleries that will
be documented.

Nb Each team should have 4 or 5 mini galleries to work with.
If you want to you can link them together so that it appears as if this is a
major exhibition and you would then curate each ‘room’. Alternatively you can
decide that one, or two mini galleries are to be used and the others kept for
something else. This will depend on approachs to the work presented.

Nb C, M, Y, K groups will be decided upon at some point during the introductorary sessions.

Another workshop we are thinking about uses mobile phones as an icebreaker.

The mobile phone concert as ice
breaker

Two groups are formed from all
students available.

The first step is to divide each
group up by cell phone brand.

Once divided into phone brands
each group has to find a common ring tone that the majority of phones have. The
Nokia group perhaps the “Nokia Tune”, Motorola “Hello Moto”, etc. but this is
to be agreed by each group. Those without common ring tones can partner up with
someone else without a common ring tone.

Groups to work towards
constructing order out of chaos. The goal is to be able to construct and send a
finished ‘symphony’ to the other group.

The aim is not to create a
cacophony of phones going off at once, so you need to have different sections
play at different times, like a symphony. Instead of the “string section”, you
might have the “Samsung section”.

At some point you will need to
get back together to pair off with the other group and trade phone numbers, group
A will be the first ‘instrument’ and B will be the caller, roles will then be
reversed.

The callers will at some point
need to elect a ‘conductor’, so that all callers are clear as to when they send
their sound ‘message’, as well as a recorder, (someone who will record the
symphony and post it onto a social media platform).

After the ‘instrument’ group is
in place and ready, one student rings the ‘caller’ conductor to let him/her
know and then the conductor counts off the sender group, or selected sub-groups
to ring at counted off intervals, until the symphony is played.

Everyone then as individuals
writes up the process and records their thoughts.

Each collaborative workshop session will have to be active, maintain interest throughout, deliver a clear outcome, be designed to get over a particular issue surrounding collaborative practice and work as an realistic introduction to documenting practice. The two staff delivering need to be clear about what is being delivered as we are in two separate studios. Probably the biggest issue is that of numbers. I have posted in relation to the collaborative module a couple of times before (you could use labels to collect them together) and each time the numbers to deal with increase. The first post records 50, the second 80 and this year we have 96 students enrolling. I won't be in post next year as this is my last year of phased retirement, but I would presume there will be a planned enrolment of 100. This continuing increase in numbers means that each year some areas of collaborative practice have to be dropped and others refined so that larger groups can be engaged. In particular I find myself having to do more work as an orchestrator and organiser. I am delivering less content and spending more time spinning plates. The larger the group the more chance some students will become disengaged because they don't really understand the use of the sessions, don't understand the instructions, so feel 'stupid' or embarrassed or simply can't hear or see the instructions for the day. (We set the stools out in the studio so that new first years could sit and listen to welcoming talks, the stools filled half the studio when laid out and some students you could predict were going to end up behind a pillar or other obstacle that will obscure their view.) One big issue of course will be what I call the murmuration, that noise made by large groups of people when they communicate internally. Janet Cardiff made great use of that in her '40 Part Motet', a beautiful piece responding to a Thomas Tallis composition. She had separately recorded the 40 individuals who would sing this and assigned to each individual a separate speaker, which was erected as part of a circle of speakers when the piece was staged. As you entered centre of the room it was staged in you were struck by the collective 'murmuration' of individuals but as you walked around the edges of the room each speaker revealed the sounds of the lone human. I must use this example to help open out the collaborative idea with the students and at the same time use it to explain how communication processes are also broken down with attritional 'noise'.